Blog search spamming

My MT activity log shows several days worth of high volume searches for random names which makes me suspect someone’s bot is trying a DoS attack against MT blogs (or blogs in general) using the blog’s search service. MT’s built-in search script is pretty painfully slow, so a high enough search volume can potentially bring a server to its knees.

Fortunately for MT, an easy way to mitigate this type of attack (if that’s what this is) is with the Fast Search plugin, which mostly replaces MT’s built-in search script. It’s not a complete replacement because it doesn’t handle tag searching, but for the plain old Search box for your blog it works quite nicely.

Safe Vista upgrade guide

While I’m probably a ways away from attempting a Vista upgrade or buying a new machine with Vista, Tom’s Hardware has a very good article that outlines a number of things to consider and steps to take when you go for the Vista upgrade plunge. If you’re contemplating Vista in the near future, it’s definitely worth a read.

Simba’s so helpful

Simba’s figured out that when we go to the dog park, I grab his favourite blue football out of the trunk of the car. So now instead of waiting for slowpoke me to grab the ball, he’ll just hop into the trunk, grab the ball and jump out. The people at the dog park thought it was pretty funny when they saw him jump into the trunk.
What’s even better is that sometimes when we’re leaving, he’ll jump into the trunk to put the ball back and then jump back out. Most of the time though he’ll just jump in to try and grab one of the other toys we stash in there.

Raytracing is hard work

The Last Guardian by Johnny Yip
This POVRay raytracing took 9 days and 15 hours for my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150, 3.2 GHz) to render. It’s not mine (if I could do stuff like this, I’d probably be in a different line of work), just a very cool image that caught my eye while I was browsing the POVRay Hall of Fame. I thought it would be fun to see how long it would take a scene like this to render. I figured a few hours, couple of days at most. Boy, was I wrong.
I love the things POVRay is capable of. If I had more time on my hands I’d probably spend some of it playing with POVRay some more.

2007 blood donation schedule

This year’s blood donation schedule. Six donations this year. Next year will be another seven donation year.

  1. Jan 31
  2. Mar 28
  3. May 23
  4. Jul 18
  5. Sep 12
  6. Nov 7